Hi T==
It’s great that you find my comments in the Instyle Tokyo Group very much appealing. I appreciate that you evaluate me very highly. I read your e-mail. I understand that the Anglos and Latinos have difficulties in learning the Japanese language.
However, I am not quite sure of what I can do for you. You said “I am not suggesting anything linguistic.” I understand that the Canadian market is large for the Japanese companies. And what would you expect me to explore?
I am a mere planner of business tactics of the Japanese style SMEs. My business model is often referred by my clients to be like something of professional gardeners or professional carpenters. Upon clients’ requests, I simply visit them and make highly practical plans over what they would like to do. I usually visit them continuously after that in order to monitor if my plans function well.
I do my business not as a consultant but as an outsourcer of making tactics. Please take a look at the recommendation letter stored in the BOX at the very bottom of my LinkedIn profile page. The letter was written by a person who knows my business very well.
If your thoughts are about giving seminars or lectures to SMEs currently doing business in Canada, I am sure that I can do something that would help them. In this case, you should tell me the things including the followings…
– Theme of the seminar or the lecture
– Fee & Expenses that would be paid to me
– Timeframe of the seminar or the lecture
Then I will arrange my schedule that I can go visit the place that you would like me to be. I usually decide what to talk or what to teach by myself after viewing the business situation in question. But in this case, since I can not go check the situation in advance, I am not able to make plans of what to do. So Thomas, you should tell me what you want me to do.
I can exchange e-mails with you sometimes, say semimonthly. I can answer what I know, if you ask me. But I am not very much interested in taking a long while in researching and evaluating what to do. I am an SME business professional, who really knows that, in the SME business environment, tasks must be completed and problems must be solved, as soon as possible. So if you would like me to do something, you could order it. Then I will ask you about the details.
Well, let me describe a little about the shrinking markets in Japan, which you mentioned. The shrink of the market is so often emphasized in seemingly all kinds of media. They usually refer to the whole Japanese market by the term “shrink of the Japanese markets.” However, there are two kinds of areas in Japan. One is urban area, where the population is not decreasing much. And the other is rural area, where the population plummets drastically.
In the latter case, retailers rapidly move away from the area, when they sense the market shrink. In most of these areas, decrease in the demand results in quicker decrease in the supply. There you do not have to take account of marketing common senses, such as market segmentation and customer targeting.
I often tell my clients that the market population of 0.2 million is the threshold. If the market size is smaller than that, you might as well forget marketing approaches and reign the whole market there. If the market size is larger than that, you should differentiate yourself with marketing fundamentals, in the middle of the so-called Red Ocean.
This is so far what I perceive the shrink of the Japanese market as.
SHO